First of all I need to apologize to all of you. Things have been so crazy for the past 2 years that I have let the quality of this web page drop dramatically. I have good reasons but you couldn't possibly know what is going on in my life so I just want to say thank you very much to all of you for sticking with me and sorry to all those who have written to me and never received a reply.

I haven't really been able to talk about my situation because of time constraints and a duty to my now former employer but since I have a little time on my hands I feel that I should use some of it to let you folks know why this page has gone so long without updates.

In July of 1998 I was doing local deliveries in Northern Utah for a company called Oakdell Egg Farms. It was a pretty good job and the hours were nice so I stayed with them for quite awhile. Then one day I had to take one of our trailers over to a repair shop and since that shop was near a former employer I decided to stop by and say hello.

Immediately when I walked in the door I could tell the place was in complete chaos. The office was rearranged and many of the people I was expecting to see were not there. Immediately when I walked in the door the guy who was dispatching as well as the guy whom I had known as the operations manager asked me if I wanted a job. Instantly without hesitation I said no because I knew what that job would be like and I was happy enough just delivering my eggs and getting home at a decent hour.

The guy I knew as operations manager then stood up and asked me to follow him into the Terminal Managers' office. When we got there he sat down behind the desk and told me, "This is mine now." I assumed that he meant he was now Terminal Manager but he really meant that it was his business. The company I had previously worked for had called it quits.

By the most amazing stroke of luck I have ever heard of, the operations manager had been basically given the Salt Lake Terminal. He purchased some of the old company trucks but was given the customer lists, office furniture, etc. He had also signed an agreement to be an agent for a much larger national company. He again asked me if I would come to work for him and I told him thank you very much but I was not interested.

Now before I go any further there is something you need to know. The guy I was talking to is my first cousin. We not only grew up together but when his family first moved to Utah I was his protector. I was in Junior High at the time and I got out of school before he did so I would rush to the grade school and walk home with him because in our little country town a new kid didn't stand a chance. Some of the kids were picking on him and so I made sure that he got home safely. By doing this I missed my bus home to the next town and usually ended up walking the 7 miles to my house everyday. That is what family does and to this day I do not regret nor do I consider those times to be any great sacrifice on my part. Later I taught him to fight for himself so that he didn't need my protection. By that time we were as close as any 2 brothers would have been and I would have fought for him anyway. Years later he introduced me to my wife.

Now to get back to my story, my cousin had pretty much decided that he was not going to take no for an answer. He told me that he had some ideas he wanted to discuss with me and would I please bring my wife to his house that night so we could discuss it. I agreed.

When I got to his house he offered me a beer and then proceeded to tell me his plans. He wanted me to be his salesman. He offered a fair salary, a company car for which I was never to buy gas, 1% of my sales, a laptop computer, a cell phone and other benefits. He then proceed to tell me that he intended to retire in 5 years and that he expected me to take over as President when he did. The only condition would be that I take care of family as well as the business. That sounded pretty good too. He pointed to the nice little Ford Explorer in the driveway and told me that it was to be my company car though he expected me to use it for everything.

I told him that if I used the Explorer to say, go fishing, then I would buy the gas. His exact words were, "Bullshit! I'm buying the gas!" Well I have got to tell you that I couldn't very well say no to that offer but not wanting to sound too excited I told him that I would have to talk it over with my wife and I would let him know.

When we got in the car to leave, my wife was a little skeptical . It sounded too good to be true. Man should I have listened to her. I didn't. I called him the next day and told him that I would take it on one condition. I never dispatch. He told me no problem and I took the job, though I didn't start until September 9, 1998.

When I first started he asked me if I would accept $1,000.00 less than he had first offered as my base salary. Things were not taking off as fast as he had hoped and he needed to get a bit stronger first. I said I would. I started making contacts over the internet and calling some of the customers from the list I had built when I worked there before.

In the meantime things were not going as great in the office as we had hoped for. Some things were happening with our local dispatcher and one day I got a call at 5:30 in the morning. It was the boss and he needed me to go dispatch because he was going to put the local dispatcher back in a truck or out of a job. I said I would and headed to the office. Over the next couple of months he informed me often that this was only temporary and that he appreciated me doing it. I complained a bit and reminded him of our agreement but by that time I knew I would do whatever it took to help make the company successful. A year later I was still dispatching.

In December of 1998, just 4 months after starting there. The boss informed me that he was buying his wife a new suburban and that he could no longer afford my company car. Well I'm a little dense so though I was pissed, I just basically said okay and let it go. Not much I could have done anyway other than quit but I still believed that he would keep his promises.

He still wasn't giving me my commissions at that time and with my salary less than it was supposed to be, losing the company car put me in a real bind for transportation. He offered me a great deal on his wife's truck but I said I couldn't afford it. I was pretty depressed over the whole situation and would you believe that this guy had the gall to ask me one day why I didn't seem very happy lately? I couldn't believe I had to explain it to him but when I did he started insisting I buy his wife's truck. He told me that he would make it so that I could afford it and on that condition I agreed to buy it. He finally started giving me the commission and he also increased my salary. Though on the day he gave me the salary increase his wife came out and showed me on a post-it what it was. I went in and thanked him because it was a pretty fair increase. I guess I looked a little too happy because he called me aside later and told me that his wife had calculated incorrectly. The actual raise was only half what she had shown me and he was sorry.

Now get this, when he first offered me the truck he told me that I would only pay $200.00 per month for 4 years. I accepted those figures because for that truck I couldn't have gotten a better deal at a police auction. Well when his wife gave me the payment papers the sheet showed $250.00 per month for 4 years. That was still a good deal but not what he had offered me. I called him on it and he said something about how sorry he was, he had made a mistake. Dumb nice guy that I am, I accepted that and began making the payments.

I made those payments for about a year plus in the meantime I voluntarily quit using the gas card because I could tell that things were not going great and I didn't want to milk the cow to death. By the summer of 1999 I was in the best financial shape I have ever been in my life. Even though he hadn't kept his word about most things the commission was enough to make up for it. I knew we had a long way to go but I knew that as long as I was willing to do whatever the company needed, then we would come through on top eventually. I wasn't dispatching anymore but was the operations manager. I only had to dispatch when one of the normal people was off so it wasn't so bad. I spent a lot of time contacting shippers and brokers via the internet and was able to pick up quite a bit of freight. It was kind of difficult because when you are doing those kind of sales you almost never see instant results. Someone you contact today may not get in touch with you for a week or a month but eventually it can pay off big and I was keeping track of it because of my commission. To the people in the office who know almost nothing about computers or the internet, it appeared that I was not doing anything so every time I was not in the room they would be in the boss' office complaining about me. I don't know why it is but most people have a natural tendency to think that they are the only ones doing anything productive. Several of these particular people are the kind that pretend to be your friends while you are standing there. The boss used to tell me what they were saying when I wasn't there and we had several meetings to discuss it though none of them had the spine to say anything negative when we were all together. I didn't worry too much about it because the boss told me he knew what I was doing. I once went to Atlanta for a few days to take care of some company business and when I returned the boss told me that he hadn't realized how much he counted on me until I was not there for a few days.

In October of 1999 my family went Elk hunting with the boss and his family. While we were out hunting my wife and his wife visited quite a bit and my wife later told me that the boss' wife told her that I had saved their bacon so many times they couldn't count them all. She also said that because of that if the business went down so far that they had to fire everyone else and run it from their basement, I would be there working. That made me feel pretty good. It also helped me forget a lot of the things that I had been pissed about. A little appreciation goes a long way even if you don't hear it first hand.

In December of 1999 He called me one morning and asked me to come to his house before work so he could talk to me about something. I did and he told me that he was thinking of changing the commission. According to him it would be more fair to everyone and would actually be a raise to me. I said that was not a problem as long as I was not going to get a pay cut. He promised that I wouldn't and I didn't hear another word about it until the second week of January. When I turned in my commission statement he told me that it would be my last one because he was starting the new system the next week. The next week came and we received a very small productivity bonus. He said not to worry it had just been a slow week and that everything was going to work out for the better.

That small token bonus was the last one we ever got. All of a sudden I found myself unable to make the truck payment. Months went by and I still couldn't make it though I did make one when I got my tax return. Boy that was a mistake. About 2 months ago he called me in the office and asked what I was going to do about the truck. I told him there was nothing I could do because he had taken away my means to pay for it. He then repossessed it a couple of weeks later.

In April of this year The boss called me over to his house to "talk about something." From past experience I dreaded that meeting because every time he had done that in the past I got screwed. What he told me was that he was thinking of hiring a guy we both knew from one of our contractors to be our operations manager. That way I could go back to sales and we could really get the company sailing because this guy has a strong background in brokerage which I did not. I was a little nervous when he told me that this guy would work for cheap but I have this bad habit of denial and I fooled myself into believing that his intentions were good. When I got home I called him back to ask him if he was planning to replace me with the new guy. He adamantly said "No way!" So I agreed and we hired the new guy about 2 weeks later. I was named vice president and I went to work.

Things were going pretty good though I was putting most of my sales efforts into the computer, fax machine and telephone and they didn't like that too much. They wanted me out on the street which is where I wanted and planned to be but I truly believed I had the best plan to cover the most ground with the least expense. In my mind I thought I was doing them a favor.

A month or so ago we had two dispatchers quit within a couple of weeks of each other. The operations manager we hired is pretty good at sales and brokerage so I volunteered to do the local dispatch. It would have been his job but I wanted brokerage to keep growing and knew that trying to run the local desk can be a high stress full time job so I figured our best chances for success would be for me to do the dispatch and for him to keep doing what he was doing. The boss told me that this would be very helpful since we were in our slow time and it would be good not to have to replace that salary right away. I have been dispatching since.

A couple of weeks ago the boss told me that he was very pleased with how things were going even though we were in our slow season. He also told me that he knew he had several customers that he would not have if it were not for me. I felt good because until then I thought I was the only one who knew that. On the other hand, I was still having some money problems and couldn't see how I was going to fix them with my current pay. That promised "no paycut" was sucking me dry and I knew I had to do something. I had a week of vacation coming up so I decided that I was going to talk to the boss about my money and if he fixed it I would just go on vacation. If he did not then I was going to use the week to find a new job. He compromised and made up a portion of what he had taken away and I figured that as long as I was careful I could get by with that and not have to find a new job. I used my vacation to do some yard work and spent 3 days fishing with my sister and her husband.

I came back to work the following monday and could tell right away that something was not right. There were several closed door meetings that I was not invited to and a lot of whispering going on when people thought I couldn't hear. On August 4th I got to work and the boss was already there at 6:45 in the morning. This was unusual because he usually don't get there until 10:00 or 11:00 or whenever he happens to feel like it. I'm used to unlocking the door in the morning and locking it back up at night. I went in to ask him if there was a problem and he made up some excuse about needing to get the payroll done early because he had a golf appointment with a couple of customers later.

A couple of hours after that he called me into his office and said that he could no longer afford to pay me. I almost lost it. Here is a guy, my cousin and lifetime friend, who spends at the most 30 hours per week in the office and in all honesty better than half of those hours are spent playing solitaire on the computer or scanning want ads on the internet for new toys to buy. In the past two years he has bought more toys like 5 or 6 snowmobiles, a $65,000.00 motor home, countless guns and God knows what other stuff, than most people will buy in their lifetimes. I have not even been to his house for the past several months because it makes me sick. Every time I am there he has new things all over and yet he has taken away everything he promised when I accepted the job. Everything he owns was paid for by other people's sweat, a large portion of that being mine, and now he has the audacity to tell me that he can no longer afford to pay me. It took an amazing amount of self control not to jump over that desk and give him a good reason to take even more money away from me. I guess that is why he didn't dare tell me in the morning the real reason he was so early; we were the only two there.

Later I went back in and asked him what he could afford to pay me. He replied that his sister would do the dispatch desk for $12,400.00 less per year than I was doing it for. I saw no point in reminding him that I NEVER DISPATCH!

So there you have it. How I went from egg deliverer to salesman to dispatcher to operations manager to vice president to unemployed in just under 22 months.

Not to worry though. I called two of his competitors earlier this week and both of them told me to come straight down. I have been in the intermodal cartage business for a lot of years and am pretty much friends with all of the dray men in the valley.

The guy who made me the best offer is in the process of building a new yard and corporate office. He said that he really wanted me but that he wouldn't have a place for me for about 6 months. I really want that job so I told him that I have a lot of miles in a truck. He was surprised to find that I could drive. He said that he was hurting for drivers right now and that if I was willing to drive then he would take me right now. I start monday and to tell you the truth I am excited to be back in a truck, even if it is only temporary. I will be doing sales too.

On a side note, my previous company is privately held but if it were not and I owned shares in it I would be dumping them at the very first opportunity. I will work as hard to make my new company successful as I did the last one. The difference will be that the owner of this company is not hiding in the office playing solitaire and waiting for everyone else to bring in the money. I feel very good about this move.

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